Season 3 was incredibly mean-spirited (spoilers)

[Ashok]

The ending erased all previous episodes.

I didn't see any evidence in Part 18 that anything from Season 1+Season 2+FWWM was erased. The way the show is written, Agent Cooper's journey appears to have taken him across two separate timelines, both of which are equally important.

I suppose you could project Mulholland Drive's narrative onto the world of Twin Peaks and make a wild guess that Timeline 1 is a "dream" and that only Timeline 2 is "real" but that's just an assumption and there's absolutely no evidence to believe that the world of Twin Peaks is functioning like MD.

[ThumbsUp]

It's also not in character. By the end of S2, Cooper wasn't exactly obsessed with Laura Palmer. He went into the Black Lodge to save Annie. I don't think the original Dale Cooper would have annihilated the space/time continuum to save Laura, especially given the fact that he "saw" her ascension in the FWWM-ending and that removing Laura could have made things actually worse (like Bob/Leland not being caught and murdering more people).

I think in terms of saving someone from the Lodge, it could've been Laura, or Annie, or Audrey, or Diane, or Janey-E, or Maddy, or Caroline. Or the waitress in Judy's.

We were discussing this in the part 18 thread, but basically, Coop's biggest flaw is his hero complex and compulsive need to right wrongs and rescue people, especially women. That could be driven by many things: his need to be a knight in shining armor, or to avoid guilt for letting people down, especially women (that was the whole premise of his Black Lodge trial in the S2 finale).

Or, it could be driven by something else - the Fireman's instructions, perhaps. I don't think Cooper meant to annihilate time and space and all that. But it seemed that escaping the Lodge and defeating Bob and Mr. C once and for all wasn't good enough. He had to travel back in time to be the hero (again) and try (again) to redeem himself for failing to protect someone.

As for the ending of FWWM, yeah, I dunno. One could argue why Laura appeared in the Red Room at all 25 years later if she really had seen the angel and ascended to the White Lodge or whatever.

If you're in the Red Room, all bets are off. You could go there for an hour, leave, live a long life etc yet some part of you will be there, out of time, always and forever.

Whatever Coop's flaws may be, it feels false to start blaming him now when he's doing what he's pretty much always been doing: following clues. Major Briggs seems pretty focused on making sure Coop makes the '430' trip, as does the Fireman. There's no changing of agency or recklessness in Coop's plan (outside of being foolhardy enough to agree to do the Lodge spirits bidding in the first place). Following clues with relative degrees of confusion has been Coop's path since we were introduced to him. If he does indeed fail, it's because the Fireman and Briggs have miscalculated. Either that, or Coop is a pawn, and expendable.

Yeah, I don't get the Fireman anymore. I feel bad for Laura. Constantly abused, denied her final peace, jerked around over time and dimensions. She feels as much stripped of her agency and turned into a pawn as Coop I think, if not way more.

[N. Needleman]

The ending erased all previous episodes.

I didn't see any evidence in Part 18 that anything from Season 1+Season 2+FWWM was erased.

Me neither.

[Mr. Reindeer]

The ending erased all previous episodes.

I didn't see any evidence in Part 18 that anything from Season 1+Season 2+FWWM was erased.

Me neither.

I think Laura's corpse literally being erased from existence is a piece of evidence that supports this reading. But I personally don't believe anything was changed in the original universe, either. I think Coop MAY have briefly altered the timeline, but it jumped right back to the way it was (hence the skipping-record noise?) when he lost Laura. Alternatively, whenever you change the past, you don't alter the existing universe but create a new one which branches off at that moment...so even if Coop had succeeded, the corpse-less world becomes Earth-2. Earth-1 still goes as it always did in the original show.

[cgs027]

I didn't see any evidence in Part 18 that anything from Season 1+Season 2+FWWM was erased.

Me neither.

I think Laura's corpse literally being erased from existence is a piece of evidence that supports this reading. But I personally don't believe anything was changed in the original universe, either.

Well, that and Sarah freaking out (and more importantly, the placement of that scene). If Laura was murdered, her story remains the same. But yes, Sarah could have been going nuts in another timeline, who knows... But there are reasons people are reading it this way.

[referendum]

I think Laura's corpse literally being erased from existence is a piece of evidence that supports this reading. But I personally don't believe anything was changed in the original universe, either.

i didn't take that literally, i saw it as a kind of wish-fulfillent. rose-tinted nostalgia. It was surrounded by many other scenes that pointed in the opposite direction.

[Manwith]

Alternatively, whenever you change the past, you don't alter the existing universe but create a new one which branches off at that moment...so even if Coop had succeeded, the corpse-less world becomes Earth-2. Earth-1 still goes as it always did in the original show.

There's nothing to suggest time works that way in Twin Peaks, with branching timelines. Sure if you want to pretend this is the Marvel universe and time works that way, you can, but there's nothing to support it. It's also contradicted by the fact we see the corpse of Laura fade away like Back to the Future.

What we do see is Sarah Palmer apparently enraged that Laura is no longer dead. The scene is very similar to the ending of Wild at Heart when the "evil witch" mom is enraged that she lost, to the extent that Lynch is basically plagiarising himself.

[Agent Earle]

Also, Cooper never had a particular deep connection to Laura Palmer, apart from weird lodge-dreams. She was basically just part of his work. Has anyone ever thought that Cooper would literally smash the universe to "save" Laura? I could see that maybe for Annie, like trying to stop Windom Earle from kidnapping her, since she is the main reason he ended up in the lodge and he has feelings for her, but even then: Erasing the timeline?

EXACTLY. Let me put it this way: for a show that's supposed to be about Cooper's personal journey to absolution (eternal damnation?), this structureless rigamarole sure spent as little time as possible (make that: zero) on people from his past that were of pivotal personal importance for him. It took a giant dump on them. But never mind, they stem out of S 2 which, as is the new Master-approved gospel, sucked anyways.

[Mr. Reindeer]

Alternatively, whenever you change the past, you don't alter the existing universe but create a new one which branches off at that moment...so even if Coop had succeeded, the corpse-less world becomes Earth-2. Earth-1 still goes as it always did in the original show.

There's nothing to suggest time works that way in Twin Peaks, with branching timelines. Sure if you want to pretend this is the Marvel universe and time works that way, you can, but there's nothing to support it. It's also contradicted by the fact we see the corpse of Laura fade away like Back to the Future.

I don't know that I have to *pretend* this is the Marvel universe after Freddie Sykes.

But seriously, I was thinking more Stephen Hawking than Marvel -- the many-worlds theory is a relatively respected/accepted theory in quantum physics. And we see Coop cross over from one universe to another (arguably multiple times, but at least once), so alternate universes seem to be a thing in TP.

[Bookworm]

I'm trying to ignore the possibility that the whole series was negated, as I said before the finale that shit like that would be the one thing I didn't want to happen. I'm hanging onto the fact that Laura was swept away from Cooper, so maybe he failed.

Again So Lynch wanted us to understand that Cooper is a failure. He just destroyed and ruined a beloved character just to make a point. Geez what a brilliant move.

[FlyingSquirrel]

The whole rationale based on Cooper having a hero complex has one huge weak point. Cooper did barely anything heroic out of his own nature alone. He was always put on that path by either the people who wanted to be saved by him, the FBI when it comes to Laura's case or the entities from the surreal realm when it comes to whatever their machinations were. Even in retrospect Cooper trying to dissuade Laura from taking the ring is consistent with the notion that he was following The Fireman's instructions because whatever Laura was the chosen one for, she needed to be alive to fulfill her destiny (she just needed a dude to guide her, because hey it's Twin Peaks) which is what the finale was all about.
There is a better argument to be made that he is at the core a tropy super hero character. He doesn't always conclude his missions successfully, but so doesn't every super hero ever at some point.

The ring has always been a bit of an enigma, though to me there's a simpler and relatively innocent explanation for Cooper warning Laura not to take it: The Arm is the one offering it to her. Cooper has just learned that The Arm is, well, The Arm, and he knows that Philip/MIKE lost his arm when making his break with BOB. So he probably puts 2 and 2 together and figures that The Arm represents the more malevolent aspect of MIKE's personality and should not be trusted.

I'm not sure that Cooper's problem is exactly a hero complex so much as thinking he has more understanding and control of the supernatural forces at work than he actually does. The fact that The Fireman alluded to Richard and Linda and 430 doesn't mean that he was actually telling Cooper to "cross over," or that Cooper would necessarily understand what's supposed to happen after crossing over even if that was the Fireman's intention. Maybe he was never meant to find "Carrie" or take her to Twin Peaks and Laura was trying to warn him *not* to do that when she told him "I am dead, yet I live."

As Cooper himself said, the shortest distance between two points is not necessarily a straight line. Involve the Lodge spirits, and the shortest distance between two points may well be a ten-dimensional M.C. Escher drawing.

[Novalis]

I think Laura's corpse literally being erased from existence is a piece of evidence that supports this reading. But I personally don't believe anything was changed in the original universe, either.

i didn't take that literally, i saw it as a kind of wish-fulfillent. rose-tinted nostalgia. It was surrounded by many other scenes that pointed in the opposite direction.

Exactly. I think this is key to getting a handle on the whole way Lynch works with 'story'. He creates contradictory scenes pointing to different things happening. We're far from being the first to notice this, it's been written about plenty, and I don't mean on forums but in published studies of his work (not to demean what we're doing here -- this is vital work of a different kind). And this is why I maintain we got two different endings with parts 17 & 18: two different 'peak experiences'. Also consider this: maybe the season appears to end in two different ways because Frost and Lynch, with their very different proclivities, required different things from an ending, and simply couldn't agree -- so they agreed to disagree. I think fans will have to do this too, because while one camp seem to think some events are over-written, retconned or written out, another emerging camp (which I'm in, and apparently some others including Needleman and Ashok) is saying not. I'm fine with there being multiple stories / perspectives on 'what happened at the end of Twin Peaks', because I think the divergent (rather than convergent) nature of what has been shown invites it. The more the merrier.

Like Lynch says, if an author writes a novel with a really ambiguous plot, open to many interpretations, and then promptly dies the day after publication, who do you ask for an authoritative answer on what it means? Well that's pretty much life in a nutshell. You have to consider multiple possibilities, and no-one can force you to decide amongst them. Maybe the author never decided either.

[referendum]

novalis

Exactly. I think this is key to getting a handle on the whole way Lynch works with 'story'.

something that has occurred to me more than once is that he actually thinks this is more ' realistic ' as to how people communicate and connect, than straight narrative. For instance, if i told you about ( whatever) story about my relationship with ( for example ) my ex wife, you would expect me ( at some point ) me to go into a bit that said, ' of course i can also see things from her point of view' and make the argument against myself.

I think this is the kind of thing that Lynch is getting at. Truth not to 'narrative' but to PEOPLE. Which must ( in so-called real-life ) allow for narrative being unreliable.

[Ashok]

I'm not sure that Cooper's problem is exactly a hero complex so much as thinking he has more understanding and control of the supernatural forces at work. The fact that The Fireman alluded to Richard and Linda and 430 doesn't mean that he was actually telling Cooper to "cross over," or that Cooper would necessarily understand what's supposed to happen after crossing over even if that was the Fireman's attention. Maybe he was never meant to find "Carrie" or take her to Twin Peaks and Laura was trying to warn him *not* to do that when she told him "I am dead, yet I live."

Is there any reason to believe with absolutely certainty that Cooper failed? I'm honestly not sure what to make of the Fireman myself, but I don't see anything that would suggest the Fireman DIDN'T want Cooper to "cross over" either. At least he didn't say "don't remember 430".

[Ross]

I didn't see any evidence in Part 18 that anything from Season 1+Season 2+FWWM was erased.

Me neither.

I think Laura's corpse literally being erased from existence is a piece of evidence that supports this reading. But I personally don't believe anything was changed in the original universe, either. I think Coop MAY have briefly altered the timeline, but it jumped right back to the way it was (hence the skipping-record noise?) when he lost Laura. Alternatively, whenever you change the past, you don't alter the existing universe but create a new one which branches off at that moment...so even if Coop had succeeded, the corpse-less world becomes Earth-2. Earth-1 still goes as it always did in the original show.

This is how I took it as well. I actually lean more towards the first- that Cooper tried to change things, but the universe said "no". Laura vanishes, and the original timeline is restored. Cooper's mistake was trying to "save" Laura when she had already saved herself. (Even though the Giant did have a hand in guiding him there).